Publikation
Orchra: Stateful-aware Cross-slice Workload Migrations in the 6G Control Plane
Anthony Kiggundu; Bin Han; Hans Dieter Schotten
In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking, CSCN 2026. IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (IEEE CSCN-2026), September 7-9, London, United Kingdom, IEEE, 2026.
Zusammenfassung
Network slicing is a foundational capability of Fifth Generation (5G)-Advanced and emerging Sixth Generation (6G)
networks, yet practical support for seamless runtime slice transitions remains limited. Standard cloud-native 5G architectures
lack native support for stateful inter/intra-slice session migration, relying instead on high-overhead Non-Access Stratum (NAS) re-
registrations, container redeployment etc., which disrupt user-plane traffic for up to 245.50 ms. To address this limitation,
we present Orchra1, an intelligent orchestrator for stateful, low-latency context transfer. By externalizing critical user equipment
state—including NAS context, security keys, and Protocol Data Unit (PDU) session information—into a transient staging layer,
Orchra preserves session continuity across slice boundaries without requiring full re-registration.
Experimental evaluation shows that Orchra reduces this user-plane interruption by more than twice in comparison to con-
ventional Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)-based approaches while incurring negligible security overhead. These
results demonstrate a practical and reproducible approach for enabling seamless, state-preserving slice transitions in cloud-
native 5G-Advanced networks.